During last night's edition of "The O'Reilly Factor" on the Fox News Channel, host Bill O'Reilly again distorted his controversial February 4, 2003 exchange with Jeremy Glick, the son of a man who died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. As we have noted before, O'Reilly has repeatedly misquoted Glick in recent months.
During Glick's appearance on the show, which was cut off early by O'Reilly, he said former President George H.W. Bush Sr. and the US government were "responsible" for training and supporting "the parties involved" in the Sept. 11 attacks, a "legacy" he said was "inherited" by President George W. Bush:Our current president now inherited a legacy from his father and inherited a political legacy that's responsible for training militarily, economically, and situating geopolitically the parties involved in the alleged assassination and the murder of my father and countless of thousands of others.
But in an interview last night with Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly, O'Reilly utterly misrepresented these comments, going further than ever before in promoting a fictitious version of what took place. First, he offered this absurd description of Glick's comments:
He came on this program and accused President Bush of knowing about 9/11 and murdering his own father. When I asked him for any evidence to prove that outrageous assertion, as you've just admitted, he not only didn't have any, but filibustered through, alright? And continued to make these wild accusations without any backup, whereupon I told him to shut up and get off the show.
Later, O'Reilly added, "I am not going to let anybody come on this program and accuse the President of the United States of murdering someone without proof and allow him to filibuster."
This is actually the third time O'Reilly has falsely claimed that Glick said Bush knew about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance. On Sept. 18, 2003, O'Reilly claimed on his show that Glick "accused President Bush of knowing about 9/11 before it happened." The next night, O'Reilly read Glick's direct quote in an implicit clarification, then said that "Glick was saying without a shred of evidence that President Bush and Bush the elder were directly responsible for 9/11." Then, during an October 8, 2003 interview on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air," O'Reilly again falsely claimed Glick "proceeded to blame President Bush and his father, Bush the elder, for orchestrating the [Sept. 11] attack on their own country."
O'Reilly's claims that his show is a "no spin zone" grow more hollow by the day.
Related links:
-O'Reilly repeatedly misquotes Glick (Brendan Nyhan, 10/16/03)
In an outrageous column, New York Post columnist Ralph Peters compares Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean and his supporters to Nazis.
Under the headline "Howard the Coward," Peters writes that "the real totalitarian threats of our time come from the left. And no public figure embodies the left's contempt for basic freedoms more perfectly than Howard Dean." He claims later that "Dean and his Deanie-weenies do all they can to restrict the free speech of others" and that the former Vermont governor has "a shameless disregard for the First Amendment."
What evidence does Peters provide to support these wild allegations? First, he compares the responses of Dean supporters to the candidate's critics with the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, writing, "I can predict with certainty that Dean's Internet Gestapo will pounce on this column, twisting the facts and vilifying the writer, just as they do when anyone challenges Howard the Coward."
He later adds this:
Dean wants to muzzle his Democratic competitors, too. He believes the Democratic National Committee should shut them up. His followers try to intimidate other presidential aspirants by surrounding the cars delivering them to their rallies and chanting to drown out their speech. Of course, Dean denies any foreknowledge or blame.
Of course, Dean's attempts to preempt criticism from his rivals may be objectionable, but they are hardly totalitarian. Similarly, his supporters may have behaved irresponsibly (though Peters provides no specifics), but their actions surely do not merit comparisons to the Gestapo or authoritarian attempts to restrict free speech.
Nonetheless, Peters draws an extended analogy between Dean's campaign and the Nazis, claiming that "[t]hese are the techniques employed by Hitler's Brownshirts. Had Goebbels enjoyed access to the internet, he would have used the same swarm tactics as Dean's Flannelshirts." He describes a series of statements by Dean that he finds objectionable as "Big Lies," a reference to the propaganda strategies of the Nazis; explicitly likens Dean's tactics to those of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda ("It's Goebbels again: Just keep repeating the lies until the lies assume the force of truth"); and writes that "Dean was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl" (a German filmmaker who made films glorifying the Nazi regime).
Toward the end of his column, Peters offers two more crude Nazi analogies, referring to the "humble Volk" (a term for the German people) and calling Dean "Herr Howie" (equivalent to Mr. in English) [italics in original], before switching to a nonsensical set of comparisons between Dean and former Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev.
At the end of the column, Peters assures readers that he doesn't "really see Howard Dean as a potential dictator." This puts the lie to his shameful tactics, which echo recent comments by philanthropist/financier George Soros comparing a statement by President Bush to Nazi slogans (similar claims frequently appear on the fringes of left-wing discourse). Such comparisons between domestic political opponents and totalitarian regimes, authoritarian governments or terrorists are smears that can only be described as attempts to incite hatred by association.
Related links:
-Spinsanity on comparisons to terrorists, Iraq and the Taliban
In a minor but persistent error that is symbolic of the media's factual sloppiness, reporters and pundits continue to claim that Harley Sorensen, an outspoken left-liberal columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate.com website, is a writer for the newspaper itself. Similar errors have been made in characterizing the writings of Mark Morford, another left-liberal writer for the website.
In short, while SFGate.com is the website of the Chronicle, neither of these writers publish articles in the print newspaper themselves (a Nexis search reveals no articles under either writer's byline), so it is incorrect to call them columnists for the Chronicle, a description which vastly overstates their importance.
The latest offender is Oliver North, who wrote in his syndicated column last Friday about rumors "that President George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the attacks. Columnist Harley Sorensen writing in the San Francisco Chronicle put the whispers to paper: 'Bush knew something was going to happen involving airplanes. His attorney general, John Ashcroft, knew. His national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, knew. They all knew.'"
Sorensen has also been mischaracterized as a writer for the Chronicle in OpinionJournal.com's Best of the Web Today (5/22/01 and 6/11/01, corrected 6/22/01), a column by Edward Achorn in the Providence Journal-Bulletin (6/5/01), an editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (7/14/01) and an article by Marvin Olasky World Magazine (8/30/03), while Morford's affiliation has been described incorrectly in a Richmond Times Dispatch editorial (6/7/01), Best of the Web Today (6/21/01, corrected 6/22/01) and an unsigned LA Weekly article (4/25/03).
Sorensen and Morford often make outrageous statements that are worthy of criticism, but their rantings do not appear in the print version of the Chronicle itself. This is easy to determine. Let's hope pundits finally start doing their homework.